Umm, no?
Way more people leave over their favorite heroes being unviable for years, reworked for no real reason, obviously favor stream friendly heroes that they dont necessary like and completely destroy an entire role because it was able to do its job at some point, denying kills.
That is why people leave, not because a streamer stops playing the game or stops covering the news around it. FF14 stream scene was basically dead until a certain bald dude had enough of wow and draw a huge attention to it, the game still had a huge palyerbase who was just fine with the game without the stream scene and would defend it religiously. Because the game was good.
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Yet it’s streamers, who provide publicity for this game. So as long as they say, that game is not dead, there would be naive fools falling for such bait.
Sure, it’s not usually the case, but Blizzard are desperate at this point. To maintain, at least, impression, that Overwatch IP is popular and wanted. That things are doing fine and would do even better, even when sad facts tell different story.
They aren’t concerned with existing people leaving - they are concerned with new players not coming. Your game may be absolute trash, but as long as for each player leaving you have 1 or more new ones, you are doing ok.
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And that is why you and everyone else should try to convince them otherwise, streamers are not the real reason wether or not a game lives or dies.
The key is a healthy playerbase, and what we have now is anything but.
You cannot fix this by doubling down and catering towards a scene that is completely disconnected from the actual game people try to play.
Easy to solve it, word of mouth among IRL friends. Right now i would rather not recommend the game to any of my friends, because the game is bad. Its balance is down a hole so deep that im pretty sure i can find Luke Skywalker’s hand somewhere in its bottom.
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So far that “word of mouth” wouldn’t be pleasant.
Devs would probably try to convince playerbase themselves, that things would do fine, but they kind of lost all credibility in player’s eyes.
But as long as famous streamer would recommend game, talk about it, etc. people would go to try it. After all, streamer with hundreds of followers won’t lie to all of them, right? /s
Maybe even some of your friends would say “you say game is trash, streamer x said it’s great, probably streamer x is more objective, than you”. Sure, then your friend may come back and say “sorry I didn’t believe you, I got fooled”, but at this point they served their purpose, improving overall picture and giving some money to Blizzard.
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Its up to them to earn that back, it will be a long process, but their recent decisions are not really painting a good picture with Cassidy flying around like a helicopter,Hanzo ricocheting arrows left and right, while the already dying tank playerbase is leaving in droves. All while signing NDA-s with content creators and keeping everyone else in the dark.
Or they would be ridiculed to no end by their own chat for sticking to the game. Just look at Asmongold. His entire channel hates wow, and the very wast majority of his viewers dont even play it, they are watching him for his personality, not the game.
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Every player can influence balance directly through feedback here - which it is clear they listen to - or through the data.
I thought it would be common sense but having a private discord to provide feedback doesn’t mean it is carried into the game.
Also, practically, aside from how it’s done today (collating from forums and through data), how do you collect the average player’s feedback in a representative way?
This was probably the case, even die hard ow creators were switching or taking a break and in worse cases making doom and gloom videos, this was why they were given attention too.
That said i do think they were given or shown something substantial to keep them hooked, its probably a chance for them to drop ow2 beta keys like valorant, no content creator in their right mind would refuse that offer as its free moolah.
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The Mercy megathread was a clear but not the only evidence that they do not listen to feedback.
They listen to raw numbers and players who have some kind of influence and is advocating towards the game being a highly competitive environment.
The problem with this,is that most numbers they base their decisions on,can be easily explained or debunked. It happened with Symmetra’s winrate debacle that caused her first rework even thou they were 100% sure she is fine.
Can you guess, what happens if you handpick enough people from the same environment with similar mindsets? I refuse to believe, that there are people there who are advocating for more casual approach, or whose sole purpose being there, is to represent the average player.
Its not hard to determine if a certain forum user is just another “nerf x its dumb reee” kind of person or he/she has actually thought about what he/she is talking about for a long time and is doing it consistently even if you do not agree with them.
Mark those users and send out surveys to them, or better yet invite them to that discord to provide a more direct way of communication and prevent it from being an echochamber.
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However, said content creator can ruin their own reputation that way, if they give away keys to bad game.
Just like game journalists, content creators can earn title of “sellout” this way. And yes, it’s offer any content creator would find hard to resist, but free cheese usually found only in mousetrap.
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Hi Andy,
Regarding your statement here:
Blockquote
There’s a certain point where what I say about what’s happening behind the scenes starts to spoil the efforts and countless hours of work of all of the people who would be involved in our major beats and announcements.
Are you positive that OW2 will be such a big bang that sharing some details of what is happening behind the scenes will spoil the work of your colleagues? I am thinking that’s what happened in the last year’s Blizzcon and pretty much everyone’s reaction was “okay? that’s it? No roadmap, no nothing?”. Or how a very eccentric famous streamer put it “It’s the same game” .
I don’t necessarily see eye to eye with the (more vocal) majority on this one, personally I am very eager to see how 5v5 plays, but in terms of communication with community (it got better since you/jodie came in) the last 3 years were abysmal.
I think most of us would really appreciate sort of a high level roadmap as it is a way to keep the team accountable on their words and maybe finally go against the whole “Blizzard Soon tm” meme.
This is not a critique towards you but more on how mishandled I think Overwatch communication was for the past years. Aaron Keller - “We will be talking more about ow 2 PVP later in the year so there is still more to come”. This was last May in the developer update. What did we get last year after the PRO testing and Reddit AMA? Silence mostly and an update patch in beginning of August.
We really need to SEE what you guys are working on to get some sort of reassurance. My fear is that whoever is on top thinks that hyping up things is the way to go, when in reality there will not be much substance to get this game past the first couple of months when everyone will try it and when the hype will go down we will get the same treatment we’ve been getting so far. I sincerely hope I am wrong.
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It’s honestly beyond me why a few dozen content creators are that much more important than literally millions of players that, you know, actually keep the game alive by playing it. But IMHO we’re not asking to find out stuff at the same time as those creators, just within a vaguely reasonable timeframe afterwards so we’re not constantly left in the dark.
I mean, the secret content creator meeting was nearly six weeks ago now and the community still knows absolutely nothing. Do YouTubers need six week lead times to make a few videos?
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If players are important, then why are they kept in the dark?
Community is running out of last drops of trust and faith in you like that. Promises of “great things” can only get you so far. Now it raises suspicion, that whatever you are doing is absolutely awful for everyone, except your closed circle of content creators, which would explain you trying to keep it under wraps.
Let’s be clear for a moment - you(specifically you, AndyB, and whoever else are responsible for “work with community”) inherited bad legacy. It’s upon you to fix it, or to ruin it completely.
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That question makes no sense. Its like saying "if hospitals are made to help people heal, why does cancer still exist?".
One thing is being important and one thing is being someone that should be part of the communication chain or should be disclosed projects that may or may not become true at all. Those 2 things you just asked are not mutually exclusive.
Like not at all.
It’s not “handpicking”, it’s customer segmentation and influencer marketing.
They are an entirely separate audience to the casual user and must be treated as such.
I know this is new to most of you but to people that make commercial decisions in large companies, this has been a known practice for at least a decade. So I’m not going to argue on this point anymore - just google influencer marketing conference and you will see meetings where people who work for the world’s largest companies that are significantly more experienced than both of us in this area talk about how they manage this group of people for their respective companies.
See your answer is one of a player, not of someone that has to make decisions on this game.
YOU don’t agree with “nerf x it’s dumb reee” but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be represented particularly if they make up a large proportion of the playerbase.
The reality is that customer research through a medium like this is best done through data and unprompted feedback, which is what they currently get through their channels.
You just don’t FEEL like you are being listened to but when you look at it objectively, there are many examples where forum feedback has clearly gone into the decision making (a growing community management team should be evidence of that as companies don’t grow areas that they don’t use).
Now, to address what I believe is actually your core issue is that you don’t FEEL listened to…
I think Blizzard’s lack of communication before AndyB’s arrival has lead to a distrust in the community that he is actively trying to repair.
There is also a dev team that is likely jaded from the constant criticism and scandals from the past and have closed themselves off in the hope of creating a Big Bang.
I don’t think this is the right approach personally but I can see why it has landed there. In my opinion, a commitment to transparency of the next news date but they will need to be robust enough to ride the wave of criticism that comes their way as a result.
However, as a listed company, they can’t be as transparent as Bungie. An announcement from Blizzard will move the share price. That doesn’t happen with Bungie so effectively, there is no consequence.
But I think they can do more - for instance, the summary AndyB shared of the forum feedback on one of the experiments is exactly the kind of low maintenance thing the community needs more of but doesn’t get.
Wrong analogy. It’s like if someone has cancer, but doctors aren’t allowed to tell them.
If players are unimportant, than simply casting them to the side makes perfect sense. Because people being “important” includes some obligations to them.
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Wow. After reading through much of this thread, I’m seeing how bad off this community has gotten after being left in the dark with no communication or substantial content for so long. It’s like Golum from LotR. 
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You expected different?
Secrecy works in positive direction, only if previous experiences were positive.
Community is in position of child, who is told to expect Xmas gift, after receiving coal many years in a row. With parents later asking “why you hate Xmas”, when they already got conditioned, that all they would receive would be disappointment in fancy package.
Some players already wait for patch notes with dread and fear, rather than hope and positivity - that’s how far we are gone. To the point, where “exciting update” is translated into “some useless/harmful changes, that you are expected to be happy about”.
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Reading these comments is frustrating. Content creators create content they need to know information before us normal folk for their lively hood Andy and blizz acknowledges this. Regular players are at the bottom tier for info about the game that’s how it’s always b
Been. Radio silence then you hear big news and get hyped.
Now blizzard sucks at giving big news but of course y’all are gonna receive the information last we bring nothing to the table other then playing.
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